(.net) technology and society

May 30, 2006

Citizen Journalism All-Stars Align

Journalist Michael Rogers hosted an all-star panel at NetSquared on citizen journalism and social change.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media
is proud of his time spent in mainstream media. He believes that today,
the best reporting being done on Guantanamo is being done by the ACLU.
Citizen journalism tools are empowering all of us to contribute to the
transparency of information; the barriers to entry are essentially down
to zero. (Even the Pentagon is doing podcasts!)
Communities of geography and communities of interest are coming
together. There is a great opportunity for news organizations to help
people become activists within their community of choice.

When Hong Eun-taek from OhmyNews
stepped up to the podium, he was entirely surprised that so many in the
audience had heard of the site. The company's premise is that every
citizen is a reporter, and that anyone who shares a new development
with others is a journalist. Eun-taek strongly believes that this is a
platform for social change.

Since launching in early 2000, OhmyNews has grown to over 42,000
"citizen reporters." The editorial process takes their submissions and
sorts them into categories such as news, features, essays, etc. News
gets screened by a "guerrilla news desk" to make sure that it's valid.
Running in parallel to this is a team of 65 paid reporters working on
the more newsworthy items.

There are several layers of participation for individuals. You can
write a story (the company pays $40 for a front-page story, and $10 for
each second-page story), post a comment, or get involved in a chat.
OhmyNews will also host links from its contributors and from other news
sources - interestingly, other news sources will also host OhmyNews
links, which speaks to the reliability of the citizen reporters.

OhmyNews may be one of the most successful citizen journalism sites,
but the company doesn't yet know if that is something that will only
work in Korea. With some cash from Softbank, they will be launching in
Japan to see if the model is transferable. The company is also working
on OhmyNews International, which is an English-language version and
encompasses 86 countries and 1,000 citizen reporters.

Global Voices is an edited aggregator of news from around the world. Ethan Zuckerman
frames his role as an advocate, and talked a great deal about people
being detained for speaking out, and how blogging has played a part in
both drawing attention to detainees like Hao Wu,
and allowing others to connect to the person and the experience. Global
Voices tries to point directly to the people involved (such as Wu's
sister), and then gets out of the way so that people can create direct
connections.

Zuckerman pointed to how the demographics of the Internet are
drastically evolving. There are already more users in Asia (36% of Net
users) than in North America (23%). The next waves of users will come
from places like Africa, and the community will undoubtedly change as
the next billion users - authors - come online. As Zuckerman
puts it, if we assume that people will speak for themselves, then
infrastructure builders should focus on:

Access to publishing tools

Knowledge to use the tools

Translation

Context

Amplification

Global Voices focuses on these aspects in several ways: for example,
they work with groups like Reporters Without Borders to provide
handbooks to people so that they can learn to blog anonymously,
especially in environments where the blogger could be arrested.
Translation and context services are essential not only so that people
outside the blogger's native country can read the message, but also so
that readers have the context to actually understand the story.
Grassroots media authenticity is more assured when you create a direct
connection with the blogger, as versus relying upon newsbots.

Zuckerman cited Witness as a great example of an organization that gets this. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is a funder of Witness.) In another example, Human Rights Watch
has decided to not include content from bloggers in its reports, to
enhance perceived reliability and validity. Instead, HRW separately
supports bloggers on the issues.

The self-assembling newsroom, the community information resource, the
mashup - as all of this great information becomes available, the
problem of Too Much Information becomes even more prevalent. Gillmor
believes that sorting this out will require both human and machine
management.

Editors make a sprawling mass of information more digestible. Though
the preferred heaviness of the hand varied, all of the speakers thought
that there was some role for editors in citizen journalism. It's
notable that across all of the examples presented, the editors are not
editing words - they are editing the presentation of the words. Without human support for presentation, it seems hard to know what is important.